I recently wrote about the disconnect between planners and the public regarding development along highway corridors.

Today I read about a Florida Department of Transportation plan to spend nearly half a million dollars on a project along South Florida Avenue in Lakeland that I expect the public will see as a project that will enable jaywalking at the expense of motorists trying to navigate an already congested corridor.

It’s hard not to wonder whether this kind of project could have an effect on efforts to persuade Polk’s voters to approve a sales tax referendum next year to pay for transit and road projects.

Yeah, it’s state funds instead county funds, but that’s a detail that obscure the larger image that this is how the government spends transportation money and where their priorities lie.

How the pedestrian and bicycle safety issue has been framed has troubled me for some time.

It has been framed almost exclusively as a problem with the way roads are designed or the way people drive and hardly ever with the way some pedestrians and bicyclists behave.

I witness unsafe behavior regularly.

The travel the wrong way on roads. They wear dark clothing at night. They listen to music on headphones and can’t hear or are too distracted to notice oncoming traffic. They walk in the street even when sidewalks are available. They don’t use headlights or rear reflectors. They blow through stop signs.

News stories about pedestrian and bicycle fatalities rarely point this out.

It’s also certainly true that some drivers behave as though no one but motorists belong on the roads and don’t watch for pedestrians or bicyclists (or motorcyclists). They need to be educated, too.

But getting back to the DOT pedestrian project, sales tax critics could use it to argue that it’s another example of spending money to benefit a relatively small number of people and make the leap that funding for transit does the same thing, despite figures that show demand for transit is growing.